Numerous increasing demands for situational awareness make desirable optical (including infrared) imaging techniques to gather information over large fields of view. Current wide field of view (WFOV) multispectral imaging solutions are expensive not only in the economic sense, but also in terms of size, weight, and power requirements (SWaP). For this reason, they may be prohibitive for extensive deployment in mote and man-portable applications. Large format infrared (IR) and short wave infrared (SWIR) imagers, in particular, may be very expensive, and may have high power consumption.
It is therefore desirable to provide wide field of view single- and multi-spectral imaging methods and systems that have lower costs, lower size, lower weight, and/or lower power consumption, without significant loss of performance.